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Part of why I moved to the city was wanting to escape the car based nightmare of the suburbs. Couldn't do much of anything without a car or an extremely risky walk.
I could have walked a mile to the train station with no sidewalks , and then paid $20 for a ticket into the city on a train that stops at like 10pm, but all of that sucks. I stayed inside and played a lot of video games.
$20 a ticket??
Yikes.
What city?
I looked it up, it's $15 currently. Suburban NJ to Manhattan.
$15 is still kind of a lot when you're a kid
Damn, I feel blessed then. Australia's a pretty high cost of living, but our trains (+ the other modes of public transport) are like half that price in Melbourne Australia, and you can travel as much as you like. All day. Almost anywhere in the state where trains, busses and trams go.
(Or at leat most routes)
We are still very car centric though, by international standards.
I hate when nature is absent. It's not just urban centers. Large suburban parking lots with no trees are a kind of hell for me.
In the US, compare a city like Houston, TX to a city like Portland, OR. Seems like two different planets.
bruh same. everytime i have to ride through suburbs im just like damn this is so depressing and ugly
I like urban centers even when they're relatively devoid of nature. What I don't like is when nature is pointlessly absent. A bunch of tall buildings providing living, working and recreational space efficiently to lots of people? Excellent. Asphalt to the horizon so that people can drive to Walmart and then drive to Applebee's? Soul-crushing.
This is why I want to move to the netherlands. Beautiful countryside, walkable cities. Shit, I could bike to nearby cities there if I wanted to.
I'll never be able to afford to leave the hellhole known as the usa, but damnit I'll dream.
I live in Norway. Growing up, some days in school were reserved for diverse activities. Some of my friends and I decided to bike to the swimming park in the city ~20 miles away. We didn't have to bike on car roads at all to get there, as bike lanes and good side paths lead us the whole way. Being able to get anywhere with a bike at the age of 14 is an amazing level of freedom.
Growing up in the 90s in the usa, movies and tv always showed kids riding around on their bikes and not coming home until dark. Where the hell did they go? To get from the suburbs into town would be 10-20 miles riding on the edge of the highway almost wherever you live. No shoulder, no bike lane, no nothing (I did this to get to work for about a year. it sucked, got hit by a truck twice in that time.)
Norway sounds great.
Riding bikes was a fun activity. The point wasn't to go somewhere.
Riding around in the suburbs get old fast if you can't occasionally go more into the city or out into the countryside or to some other interesting place.
I didn't feel like it ever got old, as a kid. I used to love riding down hills with my friends, with our feet off the pedals to see how fast we could go. Or we'd just ride aimlessly until we'd see some old building to explore, or an animal to try to catch, or a tree to climb, or an interesting person to talk to. I don't think I started feeling like we needed to be going "somewhere" until I was a teen. People aren't as nice about groups of teens riding around randomly.
i know a place that looks extremely similar to that
Yeah, it's called america. Unless you zoom in on a liscense plate, you don't know WHAT state that is.
Well.....I guess it's not Hawaii. Besides that though.....
"I guess it's not Hawaii"
Meanwhile hawaii:
You’re not wrong, but if not for the massive billboards and the american branded vehicles- ive been to a number of cities in Europe and the UK that look like this or worse, with more traffic and more, much larger buildings….(i currently live in Germany…) Also, places in Hawaii do look like this, too, unfortunately…mostly Maui and Hawai’i where there’s this much space, but Ohau’s south shore has been bad far a long time 😕
I'd put down money on Southern California but those medians and a few other things are off.
Reverse image search is yielding Colerain, Ohio. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/24/the-talisman-of-colerain
I'm sure there's some Geoguessr player who can tell you where there's a Subway by a Hertz rental car across from a Speedway gas station, but a stroad with nationally available brands along it doesn't narrow things down much.
It's depressing seeing this in my city. Full groves of trees and fields ripped up and destroyed for another McDonald's and more and more apartments. It never ends does it ?
sounds american
Here in the Europes, I find curbside parking similarly depressing. Like, man, it should be a human right for kids to be able to go outside for playing ball. But you can't do that anywhere around here, because wherever there's kids, you can be sure that someone's parking their precious car nearby.
Only sort of related but The Florida Project is a great film that shows children playing in the dismal misery of Florida, much like in this photo.
I've seen cops hassle people for walking down the median before.
That's why I moved out into the forest to raise my boy.
...so that he'll need to be driven by you to be able to hang out with any of his friends? Sorry, I don't really understand.
I'm only 3 miles out of town. My boy is 3, the kid across the road is 5. They're already living their best childhoods like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They know how to identify and harvest edible mushrooms. They pick blackberries and huckleberries by the bucketfuls in the summer.
My property is a few acres, has a pond with fish. It backs up to a state forest. All redwoods. A healthy salmon creek runs right by the property. There are fire roads and logging roads webbed all through the forest, so we can hike and mountain bike to our hearts content all from our front door, no driving.
I'm building zip lines and tree weaves for the kids, I'm turning the off-house 3 car garage into a pub with a bar, taps and pool table. So long story short, all his classmates and their parents drive out here to play, not the other way around. This is the place to be.
That's the same outside that was there in the 80's. Kids just do other things that aren't outside to be social, now. When I was a kid, if you wanted to play with other kids, you pretty much had to go be outside.
The same outside but even more car and distracted driver.
And this could be anywhere in the USA, this could be California, Texas, Fucking Virginia or even Puerto Rico.
That very much not solarpunk. Where is the positivity? Or at least the reflexion for a solution?